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Attorney Smith has asked Twitter to hand over Trump's account information

2023-08-10 08:01:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith obtained a secret warrant last January to search for information from former President Trump's Twitter account, court documents filed Wednesday show. A judge fined the social media company $350,000 for promptly failing to comply with an order to monitor former President Trump's account.

Mr. Trump spent almost his entire four-year term in the White House posting thousands of comments on Twitter, although it is not clear exactly what information prosecutor Smith was seeking with the search warrant for the former president's account.

The comments on Twitter are now public, and Mr. Trump often uses the social media platform to insult his political opponents and others with whom he disagrees. He also called on his supporters for political rallies, like the one near the White House on January 6, 2021, shortly before the attack on the Capitol, organized by his supporters, who tried to block lawmakers from certifying the victory of Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

In December, ahead of the rally that day, Mr Trump had taken to Twitter to urge supporters to head to Washington, saying January 6 was "going to be wild".

Attorney Smith has already sued former President Trump twice. Last week in Washington, the former president was indicted on charges of conspiring to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Earlier in Florida, he was charged with illegally keeping classified documents at his property in Mar- a-Lago and for conspiring not to turn them over to federal investigators.

Former president Trump has said that he is innocent and has called the special prosecutor's lawsuits politically motivated. He is leading national Republican polls by a wide margin in his bid to become the Republican Party's 2024 presidential nominee.

The data acquisition by Twitter, now called X, may have been an attempt to secure unpublished variants of messages on Mr Trump's account.

Twitter initially resisted the order to hand over the data in January of this year, a move that resulted in the company being fined $350,000 for failing to comply with the court's timely order.

A federal appeals court in Washington upheld the fine last month and on Wednesday released its ruling on the matter.

"Although Twitter ultimately complied with the order, the company did not fully provide the requested information until three days after a deadline set by the court," the Washington appeals court said in its ruling.

Twitter's battle with Mr. Smith's prosecutors over disclosure of details about Mr. Trump's tweets stemmed from prosecutors' request for an order barring Twitter from notifying Mr. Trump about the matter.

The appeals court noted that Judge Beryl Howell "had legitimate reasons" to search the Twitter account for evidence of criminal offences. In addition, the district court found that it had “reasonable grounds to believe” that informing Mr. Trump of the order “would seriously jeopardize the investigation” by giving him “an opportunity to destroy evidence, to change behavior. "

Twitter argued that the order violated Mr. Trump's constitutional right to free speech, but the appeals court upheld Judge Howell's ruling./ Voa